The United States was built on mining. Gold, silver, copper, coal, iron: for two centuries, fortunes were made and lost underground. When the veins ran dry or the price dropped, mining companies moved on and left behind a landscape scarred with open pits, collapsed tunnels, ghost towns, and toxic waste. The Bureau of Land Management estimates there are over 500,000 abandoned mines in the country, and that's probably a conservative number. Some are sealed behind locked gates. Others are wide open, dropping straight into darkness. A few have become tourist attractions or environmental cautionary tales. These five abandoned mining sites represent different eras, different minerals, and different kinds of ruin, but they all tell the same story: dig it up, cash it out, walk away.
1. Centralia Mine Fire, Pennsylvania
Centralia isn't just an abandoned mine. It's an abandoned town, and the reason is burning under your feet. Since 1962, an underground coal fire has been consuming the anthracite seams beneath this small borough in Columbia County, Pennsylvania. The fire has spread across roughly eight miles of tunnels and could keep burning for another 250 years. Almost everyone is gone. The population dropped from over 1,000 in the 1960s to fewer than five permanent residents today.
The fire's origin is disputed, but the most widely accepted theory is that the town set garbage on fire in an open strip mine pit near the Odd Fellows Cemetery in May 1962, and the flames reached an exposed coal seam. Early attempts to dig a trench and smother the fire failed because workers kept hitting more burning coal. By 1979, a gas station owner noticed his underground fuel tanks were dangerously hot. In 1981, a 12-year-old boy named Todd Domboski fell into a sinkhole that opened beneath his feet in his grandmother's backyard, dropping into a steaming, carbon-monoxide-filled cavity four feet wide and 150 feet deep. His cousin pulled him out. He survived, but Centralia's fate was sealed.
Congress allocated $42 million to relocate residents in 1984. Most accepted buyouts and left. The state condemned all buildings and claimed the land through eminent domain. Houses were demolished. Streets were ripped up. The zip code was revoked in 2002. Today, driving through Centralia is genuinely disorienting: you see a grid of streets that leads nowhere, sidewalks lining empty lots, and fire hydrants standing in overgrown fields. Steam and sulfur gases rise through cracks in the ground, especially visible on cold mornings. Route 61, the highway that once ran through town, was permanently closed after the road surface buckled and split from the heat below. The abandoned stretch of highway, known as the Graffiti Highway, became a pilgrimage site for explorers and artists until it was buried under dirt in 2020 to deter visitors.
Centralia reportedly inspired the Silent Hill video game franchise. Whether or not that's true, the real thing is eerie enough on its own.
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2. Vulture Mine, Arizona
In 1863, an Austrian immigrant named Henry Wickenburg was prospecting in the Sonoran Desert northwest of what would become Phoenix when he found a quartz outcrop loaded with gold. According to legend, he named the claim "Vulture" after the turkey vultures circling overhead. Over the next eight decades, the Vulture Mine became the most productive gold mine in Arizona history, pulling roughly 340,000 ounces of gold and 260,000 ounces of silver from the desert floor before shutting down in 1942.
At its height in the 1880s, the town of Vulture City sprang up around the mine with a population of around 5,000 people. It had all the essentials of a frontier mining camp: saloons, a blacksmith, an assay office, a general store, and a hanging tree where mine workers caught stealing ore (a practice called "high-grading") were executed without trial. Eighteen men were reportedly hanged from that ironwood tree. It's still standing.
The mine changed hands repeatedly over the decades. Production fluctuated with the price of gold and the availability of water, always a problem in the desert. When the U.S. government ordered non-essential gold mines closed during World War II to redirect labor to the war effort, the Vulture Mine shut its doors and never reopened.
Today, Vulture City is a privately owned ghost town that offers guided tours. More than a dozen original buildings survive, including the assay office, the power house, the mess hall, and several miners' shacks. The mine shaft itself is fenced off but visible. The headframe still stands over the main shaft. Inside the assay office, you can see the original vault where gold was weighed and stored. The desert climate has been kind to the structures: wood doesn't rot quickly in dry heat, and the adobe walls have held up remarkably well. Vulture City sits at the end of a dirt road about 12 miles southwest of Wickenburg, surrounded by nothing but cactus, creosote bush, and the same vultures that gave the mine its name.
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3. Berkeley Pit, Montana
The Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, is what happens when you stop pumping water out of a mile-wide, 1,800-foot-deep open-pit copper mine. Since the Anaconda Copper Mining Company shut down operations in 1982, groundwater and mine runoff have been filling the pit with a toxic lake of heavy-metal-laden water that currently holds about 50 billion gallons. The water is so acidic, with a pH around 2.5, that it has dissolved the copper, arsenic, cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid from the surrounding rock into a rust-red soup that can kill a flock of snow geese in a single night. That actually happened in 1995, when 342 migrating geese landed on the pit lake and died from copper poisoning.
Butte was once called "The Richest Hill on Earth." Copper mining began here in the 1880s and powered the electrification of America: the copper in your walls, your appliances, and your power lines may well have started life under Butte. By the early 1900s, the Anaconda Company was one of the most powerful corporations in the world, essentially running Montana as a company state. The transition from underground mining to open-pit mining began in 1955 with the creation of the Berkeley Pit, which eventually consumed entire neighborhoods, including the original town of Meaderville.
Today the Berkeley Pit is one of the largest Superfund sites in the United States. The Environmental Protection Agency has mandated a "critical water level" of 5,410 feet above sea level; if the lake rises above that point, it could contaminate Butte's drinking water supply. A treatment plant has been processing the toxic water since 2019, but the pit continues to fill. There's a viewing platform where tourists can pay $3 to look down into the pit. It's become an unlikely tourist attraction, drawing about 35,000 visitors a year who come to gawk at what is essentially a man-made environmental disaster in slow motion.
Scientists have discovered extremophile organisms living in the pit water, including a novel yeast strain that produces compounds with potential anti-cancer properties. Nature finds a way, even in a pool of sulfuric acid.
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4. Goldfield Consolidated Mines, Nevada
In 1902, a prospector found gold near a barren stretch of the Nevada desert, and within three years, Goldfield was the largest city in the state. At its peak around 1907, the population hit an estimated 20,000. The Goldfield Consolidated Mines Company, bankrolled by mining magnate George Wingfield and U.S. Senator George Nixon, consolidated dozens of smaller claims into a corporate empire that pulled over $86 million in gold (in early 1900s dollars) from the ground. Goldfield had electric lights, a stock exchange, fancy hotels, and a boxing ring where the lightweight championship of the world was fought in 1906.
It lasted about a decade. By 1910, the richest ore bodies were exhausted and production costs were climbing. A catastrophic flash flood in 1913 destroyed much of the town. Fires in 1923 and 1924 wiped out more. The population cratered. By the 1920s, Goldfield was a shadow of itself, and by mid-century, fewer than 500 people remained.
Today, Goldfield is one of the best-preserved mining ghost towns in the American West. The Esmeralda County Courthouse, built in 1907, still serves as the county seat. The old Goldfield Hotel, a four-story brick building that was once the finest hotel in Nevada, has stood empty since the 1940s and is reportedly one of the most haunted buildings in the state. The Florence Mine, one of the most productive operations in the district, has open tunnels that explorers have documented on camera, descending hundreds of feet into the mountain.
What makes Goldfield special for mine enthusiasts is the sheer number of abandoned workings scattered across the surrounding desert. Headframes, collapsed adits, tailing piles, and rusted equipment dot the hills in every direction. The desert has preserved much of the infrastructure remarkably well. Mine shafts, many of them unfenced and dangerously deep, pockmark the landscape. The Florence Mine alone has over 500 feet of accessible tunnel, though exploration carries serious risks including unstable ceilings and bad air. The town itself has a gas station, a quirky art installation called the International Car Forest, and not much else.
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5. Cerro Gordo, California
Perched at 8,500 feet in the Inyo Mountains above the Owens Valley, Cerro Gordo was the silver mine that built Los Angeles. In the 1870s, the silver and lead extracted from these tunnels generated more revenue than any other mine in California. The bullion was shipped by mule train down to the town of Cartago on Owens Lake, then by steamboat and wagon to Los Angeles, which used the influx of wealth to transform itself from a dusty pueblo into a real city. At its peak, Cerro Gordo had a population of nearly 2,000, a smelter, a Chinatown, multiple saloons, and a murder rate that rivaled Tombstone.
The silver played out by the mid-1870s, but zinc deposits kept a smaller operation going until the 1930s. The town emptied out gradually, and by the mid-20th century, Cerro Gordo was a classic ghost town: a handful of original buildings clinging to a mountainside at the end of a hair-raising dirt road.
The story took an unusual turn in 2018 when Brent Underwood, a young entrepreneur and author, purchased the entire town for $1.4 million. He moved in full-time and started a YouTube channel called "Ghost Town Living" that has documented his efforts to preserve and restore Cerro Gordo. The channel blew up, accumulating millions of subscribers and turning a forgotten mining town into an internet sensation. In 2020, the historic American Hotel burned down in a fire, and Underwood rebuilt it using period-appropriate materials. The mine tunnels, some extending hundreds of feet into the mountain, have been explored and filmed extensively.
Cerro Gordo is accessible via a steep, unpaved road from Highway 136. The drive alone is an experience: the road gains 5,000 feet of elevation in about eight miles, with switchbacks and exposure that will test your nerve. At the top, you find a handful of restored buildings, the remains of the smelter, and mine openings that drop into darkness. The views of the Owens Valley and the Sierra Nevada from the town are staggering. Underwood occasionally offers tours and overnight stays, but even if you just drive up and look around, Cerro Gordo delivers one of the most atmospheric abandoned mining experiences in the West.
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Beyond the List
Half a million abandoned mines across America means there's probably one within driving distance of wherever you're reading this. From the copper pits of Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the coal camps of West Virginia, the country's mining heritage is scattered, crumbling, and largely unprotected. Some mines are open for exploration; many more are unmarked and extremely dangerous, with bad air, unstable timbers, and shafts that drop hundreds of feet without warning. Always research conditions before venturing near any abandoned mine, and never go underground alone. Our interactive map can point you toward documented sites across all 50 states.
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